Ceasefire Oregon’s gun turn-in outside Memorial Coliseum provided photo ops to Portland television stations, but the real gun news was at a Holiday Inn on Northwest Vaughn Street.
The Liberal Gun Club, which has about 700 members nationwide, concluded its third annual meeting in Portland. The club’s weekend gathering happened to coincide with the four-hour, annual turn-in offered by Ceasefire Oregon: Exchange a working firearm for a $75 Fred Meyer gift certificate – no questions asked.
Gun turn-ins attract media attention because of the props – all those guns. Portland’s television stations obliged by showing people carrying guns, police officers inspecting guns and guns spread out on tables.
As any member of the Liberal Gun Club could tell you, the story of a gun’s life depends on whose hands are holding it.
Many of the club’s members enjoy sport shooting, and the weekend’s agenda included a visit to the English Pit gun range. They hope their gun safety classes will eventually be accredited by states. A member with ties to Blue Steel Democrats, the Gun Owners Caucus of Oregon, said he would try to help start the process.
Club members were enthusiastic about a bumper sticker from Blue Steel Democrats: “Democrats don’t want your guns – we’ve got our own.”
Mark Roberts of South Carolina started the Liberal Gun Club more than three years ago when he visited a gun range and was told he needed to be a member of the NRA. He didn’t want to join the NRA, which has been appropriated by the right wing of the Republican Party.
The NRA’s current affiliation with the right wing is interesting because conservatives initially supported gun control in the South after the Civil War. It was an easy way to disarm blacks or anyone else likely to challenge authority.
In its early days, the NRA was mostly concerned with gun safety classes and marksmanship contests. That changed after Democrats discovered gun control.
When President Franklin Roosevelt urged Congress to pass laws controlling handguns, the NRA understood something that a son of privilege did not: Ordinary citizens don’t like being disarmed, and they don’t always trust the police to protect them.
The NRA’s membership grew. It responded to Roosevelt’s push for gun control with a huge letter-writing campaign by its members, and Congress backed down.
Democrats have been complaining about the NRA and the gun lobby ever since.
The Liberal Gun Club doesn’t align itself with any particular political party. The group has about 700 members, many of them clustered in the Northeast, Southeast and in California and the Pacific Northwest.
At the Portland meeting, about 30 members attended – most of them from Oregon but others from Virginia, Boston, Texas and Cincinnati.
During a discussion on how to increase membership, a Salem man suggested obtaining a list of people with hunting licenses and cross-referencing them with registered Democrats, then sending solicitations to those that match.
A Beaverton man objected to reaching out to people registered in the Democratic Party. He was fed up with the two-party system.
“If you want to increase your outreach, bring in the disenfranchised people,” he said.
To which the Salem man replied: “I’m a Democrat who’s voted twice for Ralph Nader.”
The club members who gathered in Portland were a friendly group with a wide range of interests – from how to photograph guns to a discussion about gunpowder, which turned into a debate about domestic sugar canes from Florida vs. canes from Brazil, which evolved into a conversation about carbon, nitrogen and bagasse.
“If we expect our grandchildren to have a planet …,” said one of the few women present. “I’m a climatologist, and I’m here to tell you we’re screwed.”
While they finalized plans on carpooling guns and each other to the English Pit, Bruce Cook of Medford, Ore., stood on a public sidewalk outside the parking lot at Memorial Coliseum in Northeast Portland and fanned a handful of 20-dollar and 100-dollar bills at drivers as they pulled in.
“Want to sell a gun? I’ll pay cash.”
Besides the money, he flashed a small card at them.
“I’ve got a concealed weapons permit. I’m legit.” Cook also wore an unconcealed FN Herstal on his hip.
He had never heard of the Liberal Gun Club, but he smiled at the name. Cook was one of a half dozen guys taking part – in their own way – in Ceasefire Oregon’s annual gun turn-in. Instead of a gift certificate, he offered to buy functioning firearms that people brought to turn in. His prices started at $80.
He had already purchased a .38-Special from a man who wanted to get rid of it because he now had young children in his home.
“The majority of weapons that go in there are junk,” Cook said of Ceasefire’s turn-in.
While he talked, a man pulled into the parking lot. He was interested in selling a sawed-off shotgun and a .32-revolver.
At the mention of the sawed-off shotgun, which is illegal, Cook gestured towards the police officers: “That goes to them.”
He wanted to look at the revolver, though.
Cook drove up from Medford just for Ceasefire’s gun turn-in. He lives next to Josephine County, which has laid off sheriff’s staff and has released jail inmates – at least a hundred in the past few months – because of budget cuts. Cook saw no reason to destroy good firearms when citizens who don’t have adequate police protection might need them.
Liz Julee, a volunteer with Ceasefire Oregon, sat at a table and distributed gift certificates. She said she lost family members to guns, including her mother who committed suicide when she was 48.
Julee handed out a Ceasefire pamphlet that says every year 30,000 people in the U.S. die from firearm injuries, and more than half of them are suicides.
Perhaps it’s reassuring to think a loved one wouldn’t have killed herself or himself if a gun hadn’t been available. But it doesn’t address whatever it was that made them not want to live. Some people want to control how they die.
Lucy Mashia, who also volunteered with Julee, told KATU she blamed guns for the death of her son, Leonard James Irving, who was killed last year outside a bar. No one has been charged in his death. At the time of the shooting, police urged witnesses to cooperate.
Somebody has to know who killed Mashia’s son, so why is the mother blaming the gun? When she goes on television and denounces the gun, what is she telling the shooter?
It isn’t the NRA that has warped the views of Julee or Mashia. It’s Democratic Party liberals who have removed individual responsibility for criminal behavior and laid the blame on an object that can’t think or act on its own.
These political pacifists long ago deserted decent people, encouraging them to disarm while criminals ignored gun laws. The NRA became the main champion for those who didn’t want to be helpless.
It’s a hopeful sign that the Liberal Gun Club held its annual meeting in a very blue city like Portland.
– Pamela Fitzsimmons
Dear Ms. Fitzsimmons,
I’m glad we met at the Liberal Gun Club meeting, because otherwise I wouldn’t have learned about your blog.
Thank you for your simple, factual observations, and the direct conclusions you draw from them.
BTW, 18,735 suicides in the US in 2009 (the last year for which numbers are available) were committed with guns. That same year there were 11,493 gun homicides and around 800 accidental deaths with guns, so homicides are about 37% of the total.
http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/homicide.htm
http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/suicide.htm
Weigh those stats against the 1.5 MILLION would-be victims who deter their attackers with personal firearms each year in the US.
http://www.guncite.com/gun_control_gcdguse.html
Mr. Oliver:
Thank you for those links.
Whenever I see homicide numbers, I always wonder how many were justified vs. negligent. If a storeowner shoots and kills a gunman, the cause of death is still listed as a homicide.
And as your link to the Florida State University study shows, there may be more justifiable homicides (or use of firearm to scare away an attacker) than a casual reading of the media would indicate.
A few years ago, my brother who lived in the Bay Area e-mailed me a story from the San Francisco Chronicle about four cases in the East Bay in which store employees shot and wounded or killed armed robbers. This story was all of nine paragraphs. Granted, half of the story was about the most recent case, and the rest was a summary of the others. But still, it reminded me of when I was a reporter in Southern California and sometimes wrote about storeowners who fought back. Often they didn’t want publicity. Meanwhile, if a gangbanger was shot and killed, the story could on for days because family members wanted to talk.
I joined the NRA in college and let my membership lapse during the Bush Administration. NRA leaders lost their way when they got too involved with the man in the White House. I’m still a gun owner, I’ve been to the English Pit.
As always – an excellent post.
Part of the issue with gun control is that it ignores legal vs illegal access. Guns seem always available to felons, gangs, etc.
The recent gun turn in did nothing to take the guns out of the hands of those responsible for the rash of shootings in Southeast Portland.
There is an argument – I suppose – that elimination of one gun from a child’s access is worth gun control laws. But that is the ‘throw the baby out with the bathwater’ solution.
A parent who permits a child access to a gun ought to be punished – not talk gun control.
But we may want to discuss what guns are we – or should we be – worried about. Handguns versus the military grade weapons seems open to serious discussion in the realm of gun control.
It seems too that where ‘guns’ are permitted is a discussion topic. I feel uneasy about guns being carried – in the open or not – in places like bars, or frankly, any public place..
Finally in my brief diatribe, it might be interesting to note that the military has strict gun control outside the war theater. And, I think the same is true even in the war theater. Recent ‘green on blue’ shootings in Afghanistan is evidence that wearing the uniform doesn’t mean carrying a weapon.
Thanks, Larry.
California has a law that makes it a crime to leave a gun out where a child under 16 finds it and causes injury. In one case I knew about, the grandson of a politician accidentally killed his baby brother with his dad’s gun (the dad was a police officer). Charges weren’t filed because prosecutors believed the family had already been punished enough by losing a child, which made sense.
But in another case an 11-year-old girl pointed a loaded shotgun through her living room window at two 14-year-old boys who wouldn’t leave her yard. The gun went off killing one boy and severely disfiguring the other. That mother ended up getting a year in prison. It turned out the reason she bought the gun was because she felt threatened by a California Highway Patrol officer who wanted to date her.
The boy who was disfigured seemed to be regarded as a bully by some girls in the neighborhood. I discovered that another girl had previously shot at him with a paint-ball gun.
The shotgun blast took off a large section of his lower face, and he underwent extensive cosmetic surgery. He struck me as being in better shape than the girl. She was an A student before the shooting, but not after.
Ms. Fitzsimmons, have you considered joining the LGC?
As a parent of a soon-to-be 11 year old son, I have spent a lot of time going over gun safety and have no concerns about him wanting to hold ‘Daddy’s Magic Gun’. Also, he’s attended several Eddie Eagle classes at the local gun range. It is up to the parents to protect their children, we chose to protect him from fear of guns and instead taught him to respect them and how to be safe around them.
The ability to own a gun is a right, the excersize of that right is a choice. I have no expectation of protection from being murdered as the State already has decided that I do not hold that right thanks to Bowers v. DeVito “…there is no constitutional right to be protected by the state against being murdered.”
Gun ‘buy offs’ serve the purpose of getting firearms that were locked in safes and secured in houses ‘off the streets’. Kudoes to the folks that stand a block away and give a better cash prize for guns that folks don’t want.
Erik:
I tend not to join clubs.
Have you ever read “Freakanomics” by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner?
It’s an interesting book that tackles a lot of myths. They looked at which is more dangerous to a child – a swimming pool or a gun. It turns out that far more children die from accidental drowning in swimming pools. I don’t blame parents for wanting to know if their children are visiting a home where guns are kept. But they should also be concerned about swimming pools.
Your son probably knows more about guns and gun safety than many adults. Just this week, there was a fellow in Portland who accidentally discharged a firearm through his neighbor’s wall.
The Liberal Gun Clubs safety classes are recognized in MA and IL, FYI.
Pamela, thank you for your informative and thought provoking post.
I would like to, however, point out a common misconception concerning “conservatives”, gun control, and the civil rights movement. Conservatives, by their nature are traditionalists and proponents of a smaller government, treating it as a necessary evil, leaving citizens to control their own lives. Since gun control is actually about more government control, it will be difficult to find a conservative (not necessarily a Republican) that is for gun control for anyone, including (I would say especially) racial minorities.
A more accurate statement concerning gun control for the purpose of suppressing racial minorities after the civil war would attribute its supporters as “segregationists”, not conservatives.
I suggest that instead of believing what you have always been told concerning conservatives and liberals and civil rights for racial minorities that you investigate the issue yourself. The truth is the opposite of what is currently presented to the public.
The NRA has always had diversity in its membership, has always had a minority contingency of racial bigots, and in fact did support gun control in the past. However, the NRA has done a 180 since, as you pointed out, dominance by “right-wing conservatives”. Today’s NRA is so embarrassed by its past gun control support that it is difficult to locate evidence of this fact.
I find it sad that a gun range would require NRA membership or that “liberals” would feel the need to create their own gun club. Are we so divided, that people who agree on such an important matter can’t stand to be on the same gun range together? On the other hand, I’m proud of these people for standing up for their rights and exercising them together.
As one of those nasty die-hard, right-wing conservatives I would be proud to shoot next to *any* member of The Liberal Gun Club at the range just to share the joy of exercising our freedom to keep and bear arms.
Thank you for allowing me to share.
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